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Change Management Part 1: The Big Picture

Dennis Drogseth

This is the first of a three-part series on change management. In this blog, I’ll try to answer the question, “What is change management?” from both a process and a benefits (or use-case) perspective.

In the second installment, I’ll address best practices for both planning for and measuring the success of change management initiatives. I’ll also examine some of the issues that EMA has seen arise when IT organizations try to establish a more cohesive cross-domain approach to managing change. In part three, I’ll focus on the impacts of cloud, agile, and mobile, including the growing need for investments in automation and analytics to make change management more effective.

Change Management Processes

Like many words and concepts in English language, especially when applied to technology, “change management” carries with it a wide variety of associations. In terms of the processes established in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), change management is best understood as a strategic approach to planning for change.

ITIL defines change management succinctly as, “the process responsible for controlling the lifecycle of all changes, enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT Services.” As such, change management is a logical system of governance that addresses a set of relevant questions, which include the following:

■ Who requested the change?

■ What is the reason for the change?

■ What is the desired result of the change?

■ What are the risks involved with making the change?

■ What resources are required to deliver the change?

■ Who is responsible for the build, test, and implementation of the change?

■ What is the relationship between this change and other changes?

But this system of governance doesn’t stand alone. Actually implementing and managing changes requires attention to other ITIL processes. These include (but are not limited to):

■ Service asset and configuration management (SACM) – “The process responsible for maintaining information about configuration items required to deliver an IT Service, including their relationships.” SACM addresses how IT hardware and software assets (including applications) have been configured and, even more critically, identifies the relationships and interdependencies affecting infrastructure and application assets.

■ Release and deployment management – “The process responsible for planning, scheduling and controlling the build, test and deployment of releases, and for delivering new functionality required by the business while protecting the integrity of existing services.” As you can imagine, release management and automation should go hand in hand.

There are other ITIL processes relevant to managing change effectively, including capacity management, problem management, availability management, and continual service improvement, just to name a few. From just this brief snapshot, you might get the (correct) impression that change management in the “big picture” is at the very heart of effective IT operations. If done correctly, change management touches all of IT—including the service desk, operational teams, development, the executive suite, and even non-IT service consumers. This central position makes change management both an opportunity and a challenge.

Change Management Use Cases

Image removed.Probably the best way to understand the “change management opportunity” is to look at some of the use cases affiliated with it. Effective change management can empower a wide range of other initiatives, from lifecycle asset management to DevOps, service impact management, and improved service performance. EMA consultants have estimated that more than 60% of IT service disruptions come from the impacts of changes made across the application infrastructure—and this estimate is conservative compared to some of the other industry estimates I’ve seen. Having good change management processes and technologies in place is also a foundation for better automation, as well as for better optimization of both public and private cloud resources. And the list goes on.

Even the list below, derived in large part from CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile, is a partial one, but it should provide a useful departure point for your planning—as you seek to prioritize the use case(s) most relevant to you.

■ Governance and compliance: Managing change to conform with critical industry, security, and asset-related requirements for compliance, while minimizing change-related disruptions. This, can provide significant financial benefits including OpEx savings, superior service availability, improved security and savings from avoiding the penalty costs incurred when changes are made poorly.

■ Data center consolidation—mergers and acquisitions: Planning new options for data center consolidation is definitely on the rise, and mergers and acquisitions often lead to data center consolidation initiatives. Effective change management can shorten consolidation time, minimize costs, and improve the quality of the outcome.

■ Disaster recovery – Disaster recovery initiatives may be an extension of data center consolidation, or they may be independent. Automating change for disaster recovery is one of the more common drivers for a more systemic approach to change management.

■ The proverbial “move to cloud” – The stunning rise of virtualization and the persistent move to assimilate both internal and public cloud options make change impact management and effective change automation essential.

■ Facilities management and Green IT – This use case requires dynamic insights into both configuration and “performance”-related attributes for configuration items (CIs), both internal to IT (servers, switches, desktops, etc.) and external to traditional IT boundaries (facilities, power, etc.).

■ Optimizing the end-user experience across heterogeneous endpoints – Meeting the challenges of unified endpoint management including mobile endpoints, requires a flexible adoption of change management best practices and automation. But the benefits of doing this can be significant—impacting asset management, security, and financial optimization, while increasing end-user satisfaction with IT services.

Change Management Part 2

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IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Change Management Part 1: The Big Picture

Dennis Drogseth

This is the first of a three-part series on change management. In this blog, I’ll try to answer the question, “What is change management?” from both a process and a benefits (or use-case) perspective.

In the second installment, I’ll address best practices for both planning for and measuring the success of change management initiatives. I’ll also examine some of the issues that EMA has seen arise when IT organizations try to establish a more cohesive cross-domain approach to managing change. In part three, I’ll focus on the impacts of cloud, agile, and mobile, including the growing need for investments in automation and analytics to make change management more effective.

Change Management Processes

Like many words and concepts in English language, especially when applied to technology, “change management” carries with it a wide variety of associations. In terms of the processes established in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), change management is best understood as a strategic approach to planning for change.

ITIL defines change management succinctly as, “the process responsible for controlling the lifecycle of all changes, enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT Services.” As such, change management is a logical system of governance that addresses a set of relevant questions, which include the following:

■ Who requested the change?

■ What is the reason for the change?

■ What is the desired result of the change?

■ What are the risks involved with making the change?

■ What resources are required to deliver the change?

■ Who is responsible for the build, test, and implementation of the change?

■ What is the relationship between this change and other changes?

But this system of governance doesn’t stand alone. Actually implementing and managing changes requires attention to other ITIL processes. These include (but are not limited to):

■ Service asset and configuration management (SACM) – “The process responsible for maintaining information about configuration items required to deliver an IT Service, including their relationships.” SACM addresses how IT hardware and software assets (including applications) have been configured and, even more critically, identifies the relationships and interdependencies affecting infrastructure and application assets.

■ Release and deployment management – “The process responsible for planning, scheduling and controlling the build, test and deployment of releases, and for delivering new functionality required by the business while protecting the integrity of existing services.” As you can imagine, release management and automation should go hand in hand.

There are other ITIL processes relevant to managing change effectively, including capacity management, problem management, availability management, and continual service improvement, just to name a few. From just this brief snapshot, you might get the (correct) impression that change management in the “big picture” is at the very heart of effective IT operations. If done correctly, change management touches all of IT—including the service desk, operational teams, development, the executive suite, and even non-IT service consumers. This central position makes change management both an opportunity and a challenge.

Change Management Use Cases

Image removed.Probably the best way to understand the “change management opportunity” is to look at some of the use cases affiliated with it. Effective change management can empower a wide range of other initiatives, from lifecycle asset management to DevOps, service impact management, and improved service performance. EMA consultants have estimated that more than 60% of IT service disruptions come from the impacts of changes made across the application infrastructure—and this estimate is conservative compared to some of the other industry estimates I’ve seen. Having good change management processes and technologies in place is also a foundation for better automation, as well as for better optimization of both public and private cloud resources. And the list goes on.

Even the list below, derived in large part from CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile, is a partial one, but it should provide a useful departure point for your planning—as you seek to prioritize the use case(s) most relevant to you.

■ Governance and compliance: Managing change to conform with critical industry, security, and asset-related requirements for compliance, while minimizing change-related disruptions. This, can provide significant financial benefits including OpEx savings, superior service availability, improved security and savings from avoiding the penalty costs incurred when changes are made poorly.

■ Data center consolidation—mergers and acquisitions: Planning new options for data center consolidation is definitely on the rise, and mergers and acquisitions often lead to data center consolidation initiatives. Effective change management can shorten consolidation time, minimize costs, and improve the quality of the outcome.

■ Disaster recovery – Disaster recovery initiatives may be an extension of data center consolidation, or they may be independent. Automating change for disaster recovery is one of the more common drivers for a more systemic approach to change management.

■ The proverbial “move to cloud” – The stunning rise of virtualization and the persistent move to assimilate both internal and public cloud options make change impact management and effective change automation essential.

■ Facilities management and Green IT – This use case requires dynamic insights into both configuration and “performance”-related attributes for configuration items (CIs), both internal to IT (servers, switches, desktops, etc.) and external to traditional IT boundaries (facilities, power, etc.).

■ Optimizing the end-user experience across heterogeneous endpoints – Meeting the challenges of unified endpoint management including mobile endpoints, requires a flexible adoption of change management best practices and automation. But the benefits of doing this can be significant—impacting asset management, security, and financial optimization, while increasing end-user satisfaction with IT services.

Change Management Part 2

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...